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's look at the testimony that is called into question by the PSE:
1. The claim that Oswald's rifle was found in the Texas School Book Depository.
2. The claim that bullet hulls matching Oswald's rifle were found in the same place.
3. The claim that one gunman was seen in the "Oswald window" of the Dallas Book Depository.
4. The claim that two gunmen were seen in this window.
5. The claim that a gunman was seen in a different window of that building.
6. Another claim: that no shots came from the grassy knoll, and a claim by the witness who saw the gunsmoke on the knoll that he also heard a shot from that direction.
7. A claim by a Dallas policeman that either he nor Officer Tippitt knew Oswald.
8. The claim by the pathologist—the Warren Commission's only source of information about the autopsy—that the X-rays and autopsy photographs support his testimony before the Commission.
9. The claim by a member of the Warren Commission that there was nothing fraudulent about the Warren Report.
10. The claim by Earl Warren that the Commission found no evidence of a conspiracy; that none of the Warren Report's critics ever found anything the Commission had missed; that he had found nothing since publication of the Report to change his mind; and that he knew of no Commission member who had ever changed his mind but their conclusions.
If we accept that each instance of stress indicates deception, an interesting and unexpected possibility emerges:
Oswald was involved in some way in the assassination, if only as a fall guy. Some of the Dallas police force may have been involved, planted the evidence that implicated Oswald, and covered up the fact that there was a conspiracy. The medical examiner believed his own testimony to the Warren Commission, but later had doubts. The Commission found evidence of a conspiracy but didn't believe it, so they covered it up in order to present a tidy package to the public. Later, at least one member of the Commission changed his mind, but since he didn't know what really did happen, he decided to say nothing. So there was conspiracy in Dallas, and in Washington nothing worse than blundering.
I could say all this with certainty if I knew that stress always equals deception. Unfortunately, I do not know that. But the PSE analysis of the assassination tapes has generated a staggering amount of fresh doubt regarding the Warren Report. This doubt rises not only from specific points the PSE has called into question, but from the very sinister implications of the very existence of deception among policemen, government officials and Commission members. The question remains: did such deception exist or was the stress found by the PSE the result, in every case, of an outside issue?
Obviously, whenever stress is found by the PSE and cannot be cross-checked by a structured interrogation, some probability must be accepted that this stress is caused by an outside issue. No study has yet been conducted to establish what this probability might be, but let us pick, for the sake of discussion, a figure that may seem ridiculously high—70 percent. In other words, we are assuming that 70 percent of the times the PSE finds stress in testimony, it results from something other than lying.
Now, let's ignore the deception indicated in the testimony of the eyewitnesses; even if present, it might have resulted from mere desire for attention. That leaves eight "insiders" who have demonstrated stress when making statements supporting the Warren Report: the Dallas policemen Hill, Jacks, Jackson and Weitzman; the medical examiner, Captain Humes; Commission staffer Wesley Liebler; Commission member John McCloy; former Chief Justice Earl Warren.
Assuming that there is a 70 percent chance that any single instance of stress is "outside issue," what is the probability that all eight instances are due to factors other than deception? Elementary probability theory tells us that it is seven-tenths raised to the eighth power, or approximately 6 percent.
In other words, even making some fairly conservative assumptions, there is a 94 percent chance that at least one of these eight men is lying.
My own personal opinion? I don't know. I remember the young man with the ring. He said he was wearing it, and he was, but he stressed. He stressed not because he was lying, but because there was something about that ring that really bothered him, something he didn't want the world to know. Perhaps that is also true of these men who, in one way or another, learned some part of the truth about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
I suppose I'm not absolutely sure even of that. When I first met Bob Smith of the Committee, I asked him if there was any one thing the government could do to clear up the mystery. Yes, he replied, the one thing that would help more than anything else would be to make available the physical evidence — the detailed FBI lab reports, the X-rays and autopsy photographs, the microscopic slides, the bloodstained clothing, yes, even the President's brain, wherever it has been hidden. These things, he said, would go far toward answering the questions about what actually happened that day in Dallas. Maybe they would even confirm the Warren Report.
So when I say I'm not absolutely certain these men are concealing something, I mean I can think of something that could conceivably change my mind. That is, if the government would open all its files on this matter to us and prove that we are wrong —we, the people who ten years later still believe we haven't yet heard the full account of the events of November 22, 1963.
O—